Could he tell the difference between bad and good? Some critics charged that he couldn’t. His biographer, film historian William Mann, writing in Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger, seems to think so, though even Mann allows that the Schlesinger corpus includes second- and even third-tier work. “John Schlesinger both loved and hated what he did,” writes Mann. “Shooting a film was nearly always difficult and unpleasant.” Shooting a film with a difficult and unpleasant actor made the work even worse. Shooting a film with an actor whose ego was out of scale with his or her accomplishments was worse still, and Schlesinger seems to have resigned himself to getting what he could from such people. (Mann names names, one of them one of the world’s biggest female pop stars.)

But then, on the plus side, he had Julie Christie, Laurence Olivier, and Jon Voight. The last was almost an accident, for had Schlesinger been able to shoot the strange, culture-transforming Midnight Cowboy as originally scheduled, the role of Joe Buck would have gone to Roger Ewing or, failing that, Alan Alda. That’s a counterfactual too strange to ponder, but it’s not the only one in that film’s twist-and-turn story; Warren Beatty and Robert Redford reportedly lobbied for the part of the cowboy gigolo, too.

Voight got the job, barely. On the set, he had little sense of whether he was doing what Schlesinger wanted, for Schlesinger—apparently channeling Alfred Hitchcock—believed that praise turns an actor complacent. But Voight did well indeed, and so did everyone else in the film, and on its release this week in 1969, it set huge numbers of people to thinking, talking, and debating about the merits of the movie and movies in general. It also won the Academy Award for best picture in 1969, despite its initial X rating; after Schlesinger refused to make cuts, the film board, recognizing art, dropped the rating to R on its own initiative.

Though Schlesinger later thought of the film as “gimmicky,” it wasn’t the first shot he’d fired in the culture war against Old Hollywood, as represented by Bob Hope and John Wayne. He was one of the first openly gay filmmakers in Hollywood, and he made it a point to include gay characters in his films, sometimes—as in the case of Honky Tonk Freeway—just to twit square audiences, but mostly as a nod to real life. And not just gay characters; it may have been a mere accident of timing, but it was Schlesinger’s 1965 film Darling, with a confident and self-aware Julie Christie, that more than any other single piece of work launched the sexual revolution in respectable cinema. In the bargain, it helped spark the whole Swinging London scene, without which there would have been no Austin Powers franchise.

(Pauline Kael hated Darling. She hated Midnight Cowboy, too.)

Schlesinger died four years ago this month, on July 25, 2003, at the age of 77, having often succeeded in proving that, as he said, “the reality [is] that every now and again what everyone thought was going to work doesn’t, and something out of left field suddenly does.” He wasn’t forgotten, as he feared, and though it’s likely that some of his films will be, others will surely endure—Midnight Cowboy very much among them.